Motherboard vendors are reportedly releasing revised H410 and B460 motherboards with the H470 chipset to provide Rocket Lake support. This tactic allows them to circumvent Intel’s new rules, which only allow support for Rocket Lake chips on Z490 motherboards while not allowing support on H410 and B460. 

Intel’s incoming 11th-Gen Rocket Lake processors continue to use the LGA1200 socket and are backwards compatible with some, but not all 400-series chipsets. Owners of Z490 and H470 motherboards can access Rocket Lake with a simple firmware upgrade provided by the vendor. Lamentably, H410 and B460 owners are out of luck, and it’s not because Intel decided to maliciously lock out Rocket Lake support for the two budget chipsets. 

The reason why H410 and B460 do not support Rocket Lake processors is that the chipsets are based on a different and older 22nm process node. To circumvent the limitation, motherboard manufacturers would basically have to sneak in the H470 chipset into their H410 and B460 motherboards to provide Rocket Lake compatibility although they will continue to market the products as H410 and B460.

Gigabyte appears to be one of the motherboard vendors that will use the tactic. The company has already listed the H410M DS2V V2 and H410M S2H V2 that leveraged the H470 chipset, which is ironic. Since Gigabyte has already prepared the motherboards, we assume that Intel doesn’t have a problem with vendors doing this. However, if the tactic isn’t expressly approved by Intel, it wouldn’t be the first time that motherboard vendors have bent the rules, as we saw when MSI enabled overclocking on locked SKUs in the past.